The Bonfire of the Vanities

by Tom Wolfe

  Sherman walked to Arguello’s desk and stood over him. “What are you doing, Ferdi?”

  From the moment the young man looked up, Sherman could tell he knew what the question meant and that he knew he was wrong. But if there was one thing an Argentine aristocrat knew, it was how to brazen it out.

  Arguello locked a level gaze onto Sherman’s eyes and said, in a voice just slightly louder than necessary: “I’m reading The Racing Form.”

  “What for?”

  “What for? Because four of our horses are racing at Lafayette today. That’s a track outside of Chicago.”

  With this he resumed reading the newspaper.

  It was the our that did it. Our was supposed to remind you that you were in the presence of the House of Arguello, lords of the pampas. Besides that, the little shit was wearing a pair of red silk moiré suspenders.

  “Look…sport,” said Sherman. “I want you to put that sheet away.”

  Challengingly: “What did you say?”

  “You heard me. I said put that fucking sheet away!” It was supposed to come out calmly and firmly, but it came out furiously. It came out furiously enough to finish off Judy, Pollard Browning, the doorman, and a would-be mugger.

  The young man was speechless.

  “If I ever see you with a Racing Form in here again, you can go sit outside Chicago and make your money! You can sit on the clubhouse turn and bet perfectas! This is Pierce & Pierce, not OTB!”

  Arguello was crimson. He was paralyzed with anger. All he could do was beam a ray of pure hatred at Sherman. Sherman, the righteous wrathful one, turned away, and as he did, he noticed with satisfaction that the young man was slowly closing the open expanse of The Racing Form.

  Wrathful! Righteous! Sherman was elated. People were staring. Good! Idleness was a sin not against the self or against God but against Mammon and Pierce & Pierce. If he had to be the one to call this greaseball to accounts, then—but he regretted the greaseball, even in his thoughts. He considered himself as part of the new era and the new breed, a Wall Street egalitarian, a Master of the Universe who was a respecter only of performance. No longer did Wall Street or Pierce & Pierce mean Protestant Good Family. There were plenty of prominent Jewish investment bankers. Lopwitz himself was Jewish. There were plenty of Irishmen, Greeks, and Slavs. The fact that not one of the eighty members of the bond department was black or female didn’t bother him. Why should it? It didn’t bother Lopwitz, who took the position that the bond trading room at Pierce & Pierce was no place for symbolic gestures.

  “Hey, Sherman.”

  He happened to be passing Rawlie Thorpe’s desk. Rawlie was bald, except for a fringe of hair around the back of his head, and yet he still looked youthful. He was a great wearer of button-down shirts and Shep Miller suspenders. The button-down collars had a flawless roll.

  “What was that all about?” he asked Sherman.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” said Sherman. “He’s over there with The Racing Form, working on fucking horse charts.” He felt compelled to embellish the offense a bit.

  Rawlie started laughing. “Well, he’s young. He’s probably had it with electric doughnuts.”

  “Had it with what?”

  Rawlie picked up his telephone and pointed to the mouthpiece. “See that? That’s an electric doughnut.”

  Sherman stared. It did look sort of like a doughnut, with a lot of little holes instead of one big one.

  “It just dawned on me today,” said Rawlie. “All I do all day is talk to other electric doughnuts. I just hung up from talking to a guy over at Drexel. I sold him a million and a half Joshua Tree bonds.” On Wall Street you didn’t say a million and a half dollars’ worth of bonds. You said a million and a half bonds. “That’s some goddamned outfit in Arizona. His name is Earl. I don’t even know his last name. Over the past two years I bet I’ve done a couple dozen transactions with him, fifty, sixty million bonds, and I don’t even know his last name, and I’ve never met him, and I probably never will. He’s an electric doughnut.”

  Sherman didn’t find this amusing. In some way it was a repudiation of his triumph over the shiftless young Argentinian. It was a cynical denial of his very righteousness itself. Rawlie was a very amusing man, but he hadn’t been himself since his divorce. Maybe he was no longer such a great squadron warrior, either.

  “Yeah,” said Sherman, managing a half smile for his old friend. “Well, I gotta go call some a my doughnuts.”

  Back at his desk Sherman settled down to the work at hand. He stared at the little green symbols trucking across the computer screen in front of him. He picked up the telephone. The French gold-backed bond…A weird, very promising situation, and he had discovered it when one of the fellows, quite casually, mentioned the bond, in passing, one evening at Harry’s.

  Back in the innocent year 1973, on the eve of the heaving crapshoot, the French government had issued a bond known as the Giscard, after the French President, Giscard d’Estaing, with a face value of $6.5 billion. The Giscard had an interesting feature: it was backed by gold. So as the price of gold went up and down, so did the price of the Giscard. Since then the price of both gold and the French franc had shot up and down so crazily, American investors had long since lost interest in the Giscard. But lately, with gold holding firm in the $400 range, Sherman had discovered that an American buying Giscards stood to make two to three times the interest he could make on any U.S. government bond, plus a 30 percent profit when the Giscard matured. It was a sleeping beauty. The big danger would be a drop in the value of the franc. Sherman had neutralized that with a scheme for selling francs short as a hedge.

  The only real problem was the complexity of the whole thing. It took big, sophisticated investors to understand it. Big, sophisticated, trusting investors; no newcomer could talk anybody into putting millions into the Giscard. You had to have a track record. You had to have talent—genius!—mastery of the universe!—like Sherman McCoy, biggest producer at Pierce & Pierce. He had convinced Gene Lopwitz to put up $600 million of Pierce & Pierce’s money to buy the Giscard. Gingerly, stealthily, he had bought the bonds from their various European owners without revealing the mighty hand of Pierce & Pierce, by using various “blind” brokers. Now came the big test for a Master of the Universe. There were only about a dozen players who were likely buyers of anything as esoteric as the Giscard. Of these Sherman had managed to start negotiations with five: two trust banks, Traders’ Trust Co. (known as Trader T) and Metroland; two money managers; and one of his best private clients, Oscar Suder of Cleveland, who had indicated he would buy $10 million. But by far the most important was Trader T, which was considering taking half the entire lot, $300 million.

  The deal would bring Pierce & Pierce a 1 percent commission up front—$6 million—for conceiving of the idea and risking its capital. Sherman’s share, including commissions, bonuses, profit-sharing, and resale fees, would come to about $1.75 million. With that he intended to pay off the horrendous $1.8 million personal loan he had taken out to buy the apartment.

  So the first order of business today was a call to Bernard Levy, a Frenchman who was handling the deal at Trader T: a relaxed, friendly call, the call of a biggest-producing salesman (Master of the Universe), to remind Levy that although both gold and the franc had fallen in value yesterday and this morning (on the European exchanges), it meant nothing; all was well, very well indeed. It was true that he had met Bernard Levy only once, when he made the original presentation. They had been conferring on the telephone for months…but electric doughnut? Cynicism was such a cowardly form of superiority. That was Rawlie’s great weakness. Rawlie cashed his checks. He wasn’t too cynical to do that. If he wanted to belly up because he couldn’t deal with his wife, that was his sad problem.

  As Sherman dialed and waited for Bernard Levy to come on the line, the rousing sound of the greed storm closed in about him once again. From the desk right in front of his, a tall bug-eyed fellow (Yale ’77): “Thirty-one bid January ei
ghty-eights—”

  From a desk somewhere behind him: “I’m short seventy million ten-year!”

  From he knew not where: “They got their fucking buying shoes on!”

  “I’m in the box!”

  “—long 125—”

  “—a million four-years from Midland—”

  “Who’s fucking around with the W-Is?”

  “I tell you, I’m in the box!”

  “—bid 80½—”

  “—buy ’em at 6-plus—”

  “—pick up 2½ basis points—”

  “Forget it! It’s nut-cutting time!”

  At ten o’clock, Sherman, Rawlie, and five others convened in the conference room of Eugene Lopwitz’s suite of offices to decide on Pierce & Pierce’s strategy for the main event of the day in the bond markets, which was a U.S. Treasury auction of 10 billion bonds maturing in twenty years. It was a measure of the importance of the bond business to Pierce & Pierce that Lopwitz’s offices opened right out into the bond trading room.

  The conference room had no conference table. It looked like the lounge in the English hotel for the Yanks where they serve tea. It was full of small antique tables and cabinets. They were so old, brittle, and highly polished, you got the feeling that if you flicked one of them hard with your middle finger, it would shatter. At the same time, a wall of plate glass shoved a view of the Hudson River and the rotting piers of New Jersey into your face.

  Sherman sat in a George II armchair. Rawlie sat next to him, in an old chair with a back shaped like a shield. In other antique or antiqued chairs, with Sheraton and Chippendale side tables beside them, were the head government trader, George Connor, who was two years younger than Sherman; his deputy, Vic Scaasi, who was only twenty-eight; the chief market analyst, Paul Feiffer; and Arnold Parch, the executive vice president, who was Lopwitz’s first lieutenant.

  Everyone in the room sat in a classic chair and stared at a small brown plastic speaker on top of a cabinet. The cabinet was a 220-year-old Adam bowfront, from the period when the brothers Adam liked to paint pictures and ornate borders on wooden furniture. On the center panel was an oval-shaped painting of a Greek maiden sitting in a dell or grotto in which lacy leaves receded fuzzily in deepening shades of green into a dusky teal sky. The thing had cost an astonishing amount of money. The plastic speaker was the size of a bedside clock radio. Everyone stared at it, waiting for the voice of Gene Lopwitz. Lopwitz was in London, where it was now 4:00 P.M. He would preside over this meeting by telephone.

  An indistinct noise came out of the speaker. It might have been a voice and it might have been an airplane. Arnold Parch rose from his armchair and approached the Adam cabinet and looked at the plastic speaker and said, “Gene, can you hear me all right?”

  He looked imploringly at the plastic speaker, without taking his eyes off it, as if in fact it were Gene Lopwitz, transformed, the way princes are transformed into frogs in fairy tales. For a moment the plastic frog said nothing. Then it spoke.

  “Yeah, I can hear you, Arnie. There was a lotta cheering going on.” Lopwitz’s voice sounded as if it were coming from out of a storm drain, but you could hear it.

  “Where are you, Gene?” asked Parch.

  “I’m at a cricket match.” Then less clearly: “What’s the name a this place again?” He was evidently with some other people. “Tottenham Park, Arnie. I’m on a kind of a terrace.”

  “Who’s playing?” Parch smiled, as if to show the plastic frog that this wasn’t a serious question.

  “Don’t get technical on me, Arnie. A lot of very nice young gentlemen in cable-knit sweaters and white flannel pants, is the best I can tell you.”

  Appreciative laughter broke out in the room, and Sherman felt his own lips bending into the somehow obligatory smile. He glanced about the room. Everyone was smiling and chuckling at the brown plastic speaker except for Rawlie, who had his eyes rolled up in the Oh Brother mode.

  Then Rawlie leaned over toward Sherman and said, in a noisy whisper: “Look at all these idiots grinning. They think the plastic box has eyes.”

  This didn’t strike Sherman as very funny, since he himself had been grinning. He was also afraid that Lopwitz’s loyal aide, Parch, would think he was Rawlie’s confederate in making sport of the maximum leader.

  “Well, everybody’s here, Gene,” Parch said to the box, “and so I’m gonna get George to fill you in on where we stand on the auction as of now.”

  Parch looked at George Connor and nodded and walked back to his chair, and Connor got up from his and walked over to the Adam cabinet and stared at the brown plastic box and said: “Gene? This is George.”

  “Yeah, hi, George,” said the frog. “Go ahead.”

  “Here’s the thing, Gene,” said Connor, standing in front of the Adam commode, unable to take his eyes off the plastic box, “it feels pretty good. The old twenties are trading at 8 percent. The traders are telling us they’ll come in on the new ones at 8.05, but we think they’re playing games with us. We think we’re gonna get action right down to 8. So here’s what I figure. We’ll scale in at 8.01, 8.02, 8.03, with the balance at 8.04. I’m ready to go 60 percent of the issue.”

  Which, translated, meant: he was proposing to buy $6 billion of the $10 billion in bonds offered in the auction, with the expectation of a profit of two thirty-seconds of a dollar—6¼¢—on every one hundred dollars put up. This was known as “two ticks.”

  Sherman couldn’t resist another look at Rawlie. He had a small, unpleasant smile on his face, and his gaze seemed to pass several degrees to the right of the Adam commode, toward the Hoboken docks. Rawlie’s presence was like a glass of ice water in the face. Sherman resented him all over again. He knew what was on his mind. Here was this outrageous arriviste, Lopwitz—Sherman knew Rawlie thought of him that way—trying to play the nob on the terrace of some British cricket club and at the same time conduct a meeting in New York to decide whether Pierce & Pierce was going to stake two billion, four billion, or six billion on a single government bond issue three hours from now. No doubt Lopwitz had his own audience on hand at the cricket club to watch this performance, as his great words bounced off a communications satellite somewhere up in the empyrean and hit Wall Street. Well, it wasn’t hard to find something laughable in it, but Lopwitz was, in truth, a Master of the Universe. Lopwitz was about forty-five years old. Sherman wanted nothing less seven years down the line, when he was forty-five. To be astride the Atlantic…with billions at stake! Rawlie could snigger…and sink into his kneecaps…but to think what Lopwitz now had in his grasp, to think what he made each year, just from Pierce & Pierce, which was at least $25 million, to think of the kind of life he led—and what Sherman thought of first was Lopwitz’s young wife, Snow White. That was what Rawlie called her. Hair as dark as ebony, lips as red as blood, skin as white as snow…She was Lopwitz’s fourth wife, French, a countess, apparently, no more than twenty-five or twenty-six, with an accent like Catherine Deneuve doing a bath-oil commercial. She was something…Sherman had met her at a party at the Petersons’. She had put her hand on his forearm, just to make a point in conversation—but the way she kept the pressure on his arm and stared at him from about eight inches away! She was a young and frisky animal. Lopwitz had taken what he wanted. He had wanted a young and frisky animal with lips as red as blood and skin as white as snow, and that was what he had taken. What had ever happened to the other three Mrs. Eugene Lopwitzes was a question Sherman had never heard brought up. When you had reached Lopwitz’s level, it didn’t even matter.

  “Yeah, well, that sounds all right, George,” said the plastic frog. “What about Sherman? Are you there, Sherman?”

  “Hi, Gene!” said Sherman, rising from the George II armchair. His own voice sounded very odd to him, now that he was talking to a plastic box, and he didn’t dare even take a quick glance at Rawlie as he walked over to the Adam commode and took his stance and stared, rapt, at the machine on top.

  “Gene, all my customers are
talking 8.05. My gut feeling, though, is that they’re on our side. The market has a good tone. I think we can bid ahead of the customer interest.”

  “Okay,” said the voice in the box, “but just make sure you and George stay on top a the trading accounts. I don’t wanna hear about Salomon or anybody horsing around with shorts.”

  Sherman found himself marveling at the frog’s wisdom.

  Some sort of throttled roar came over the speaker. Everybody stared at it.

  Lopwitz’s voice returned. “Somebody just hit the hell outta the ball,” he said. “The ball’s kinda dead, though. Well, you kinda hadda be there.” It wasn’t clear what he meant by that. “Well, look, George. Can you hear me, George?”